Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
By Workers’ Voice East Bay
For this article, La Voz interviewed four teachers who directly participated in huge multi-day strikes in 2018 and 2019: Nicole McCormick, Mercer County Education Association President, West Virginia United; Craig Gordon, OEA member, strike organizing leader, organizer, a substitute teacher, site rep, Oakland cluster lead, member of Classroom Struggle; Maya Suzuki Daniels, an LAUSD teacher in San Pedro, California (candidirreverence.com); and Rebecca Garelli, Lead Organizer for Arizona Educators United, 6th Grade Science Teacher in Phoenix. This is part one in a three-part series. The first part addresses: worsening (learning/working/living) conditions for students and teachers, the attack on public education and unions, and the importance of rank and file organizing along with the community around personal issues. Part two discusses how bureaucratic leadership needs to be pushed by rank and file energy. Part three delves into the need for going beyond strikes to meet substantial, long lasting demands, and the larger political & societal context. We will be posting parts 2 and 3 in the coming weeks at this website www.lavozlit.com.
WORSENING CONDITIONS FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS
One spark that has ignited teacher strikes across the nation is stagnating salaries and rising costs of living. Nicole McCormick, the Mercer County Education Association President, and founding member of West Virginia United, has been teaching for ten years and has a masters degree. She shares how, before the strike, teachers connected in Facebook groups over financial stress:
“They were sharing very personal things that were very powerful. My husband shared that we have like a dollar and some few odd cents in our checking account and it was several days before payday. We don’t have a savings account, and all of our credit cards are maxed out. And on this thread hundreds of people showed their online banking account, and nobody had even 15 bucks. It’s little moments like that where the people were just honest and just laid it out there and it was like, judge me if you want, here it is. And everybody else was going, oh my God, I thought I was the only one. I thought I had made bad choices.”
Teachers are not the only ones struggling with making ends meet. The families they serve are also impacted, which means students need more educational resources in order to thrive. Craig Gordon from the Oakland Education Association says: “we have a very high needs student population, high poverty, high numbers of students of color who are under extreme stress and all the odds are stacked against keeping teachers here in Oakland unless you improve those conditions and improve the pay.”
It is not just Oakland families who are grappling with stress and poverty. In West Virginia, McCormick states that the opioid epidemic puts additional demands on teachers and school resources. “Of course we are the first responders to this, and we’re still supposed to somehow teach on top of doing everything else.” Maya Suzuki Daniels, an LAUSD educator from San Pedro California, says that she and her students grapple with living in a “city (that) is financially unaffordable/unsustainable for families and those having children.” All of these issues are felt deeply by teachers as they try to respond to all of the needs of their communities. McCormick says:
“As a teacher you have this unique glimpse into your community. You get to see all of it, the beautiful, the horrible. You get to see all of it every day play out in the children there in front of you, and whenever you see this it makes you feel like you are responsible, that you are responsible for what happens because you see things that other people do not see. Even if you want to ignore it, it eats away at you. Because you see this is what poverty does, this is what incarceration does. This is what people not having potable water or being able to afford to go to the laundromat does.”
Teachers strikes have had to address not only teachers’ wages, but the myriad issues that arise with living in an era when wages are stagnating and spending power is dwindling for the entire working class. Rebecca Garelli, lead organizer for Arizona Educators United and a 6th grade science teacher in Phoenix, says that when Arizona teachers went on strike they were fighting for “the restoration of per-pupil funding to 2008 levels ($1B), 20% pay raise for ALL educators, not just teachers, competitive wages for all public school employees, and restoration of steps and lanes in the salary structures.” To restore public education, teachers wages are not the only area where funding must be increased. Children deserve the stability that comes from fully funded public schools.
ATTACK ON PUBLIC EDUCATION AND UNIONS
Not only are teachers struggling to survive on their pay and serve students with ever-growing needs, but also austerity is leading to teachers having fewer resources for their struggling students. As resources stretch class-sizes grow, leading to less individual attention for students.
In LA, Suzuki Daniels explains how demanding teachers take on larger and larger class sizes had grown to an extreme: “There was a clause in the contract that was decades old allowing the district to raise class sizes at any time, Section 1.5. So classes just kept growing, because this clause allowed schools to continue adding kids to classrooms rather than hire more teachers.” Oakland teachers, too, viewed smaller class sizes and more resources as a key part of their demands. Gordon states that demands included “class size reduction of four in schools with high levels of poverty and other factors that give students a particularly high need for additional support. In addition, we demanded a class size reduction of two in the other schools, and more counselors, nurses, speech therapists, and so on.”
McCormick explains that during the Governor’s state of the state address in West Virginia, teachers planned an action to highlight how much schools do with bare-bones resources. “We put up factual information about how many counselors you’re supposed to have and how way off the ratio we were. The amount of Individual Education Plans (IEP) our children have, the number of children in foster care, the number of children that are being suspended for behavioral issues.” In addition to affecting special education, counseling, foster care, and other services, austerity also cut into the healthcare benefits for teachers in West Virginia. McCormick says that on top of “a 26 percent increase out of pocket for PEIA (Public Employees Insurance Agency)”, predatory programs were proposed, such as an insidious “program called Go365, which wanted to measure your steps and your weight and if you didn’t meet certain goals and things like that, you got fined an extra $500. And WV is a very poor, old, white, small state. Because of poverty, we have a lot of health care issues.”
In addition to dealing with increased workloads and financial stress, teachers also find themselves battling against private interests seeking to profit off of public education. One of the goals shared by striking teachers across the nation has been the fight against privatization. West Virginia teachers successfully killed a 2019 pro-charter bill that would have introduced “vouchers” in public schools, LA teachers won a moratorium on charter growth, and Oakland followed suit winning a five-month halt on school closures after a seven-day strike. Gordon views the pause on closures as a key demand of the strike:
“It was, in fact, a strike for public education in Oakland. The district had announced a plan to close 24 of the remaining 87 public schools in the district, and we already have about 30 percent of Oakland students going to charter schools. That’s happened over the last 16 years, since the state takeover. When the state took over the district, they closed a lot of schools and a lot of those schools became charters. So this was a strike to defend public education and that was a very important demand.”
In Oakland, the amount of money that charters siphon from public school funding amounts around to 57 million dollars annually, seriously impacting the resources that teachers have to serve their students[1]. Meanwhile, charter schools serve disproportionately fewer high needs students. For example, the percentage of Oakland charter school students with IEPs is half the percentage of students with IEPs in Oakland public schools.[2] This leads to Charter schools receiving the lion’s share of funding without taking on the federal mandate to serve all students regardless of need. Suzuki Daniels explains that “the freedom that allows (charters) to provide opportunities to select students in their neighborhood (and there is always a cap, whether it’s by lottery or waiting list) also allows them to evade transparency and accountability by journalists/media, watchdog organizations, unions, and the larger public.”
The privatizing agenda is not being driven by educators or families, but pushed by outside influences. Suzuki Daniels states: “The charter movement is absolutely driven by investors, philanthropists, and politicians; there is a glaring and almost-funny lack of educational knowledge or background on those boards.” She adds that the charter management organizations that directly profit from public education are dominated by people who are “wealthy, white, and from out(side) of the neighborhood (and sometimes the city and the state). These are not “by us, for us” charters that started in the 90s as community-driven alternatives. These are businesses. And they ran the smaller charters under.”
The days of the 90s community charters, and the days when many saw them as a solution to issues with public education, could be coming to an end. Parents and teachers alike are now rejecting charters and the co-optation of public education funds to create private profits. Nicole McCormick, says that when the governor of West Virginia introduced Bill 451 to establish a voucher system for schools, “most parents were like, ‘what are you talking about? We’ve never asked for charter schools and vouchers. We want you to fund our public schools more.’” Additionally, McCormick shares how the voucher system was tied to a raise for teachers in an attempt to gain their support:
“They decided to put this little tiny sweetener on top of a five percent pay raise. And I think that they thought that we would sell out our students for a pay raise. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was a $20,000 pay raise. I don’t know a single educator that would have been like, ‘yes, please give us charter schools and vouchers. We want to destroy the already struggling public education system in West Virginia.’”
IMPORTANCE OF RANK AND FILE ORGANIZING ALONG WITH THE COMMUNITY AROUND PERSONAL ISSUES
An important lesson to learn from the teacher-led fight for public education and against privatization is the need for strong community support around issues that matter most to the community. There was tremendous community support in West Virginia and across the country when the strikes occurred. These powerful strikes demonstrated that their communities fully support teachers, because they understand the fundamental need to pay a living wage to attract high-quality teachers who then will stay at their jobs. Gordon describes this phenomenon:
“The vast majority of working class people across the country realize that public schools are important, particularly low income and people of color. And everybody, in terms of how much they’ve been underserved, recognized that the strikes were necessary. When you add in that we’re also fighting for better conditions for students, for smaller class sizes, for more counselors and nurses and so on, and in our case against the closure of public schools, it just becomes obvious to people that despite the sacrifice that everybody has to endure during a strike, this goal that can’t be deferred any longer. We hope to be able to continue that, a string of demonstrations that show teachers, school workers, and members of the community are ready to fight back against this.
In West Virginia, they also had school boards and administrators on their side in most of the counties and they shut the schools down. They did this with tremendous community support of all these other school workers, public workers in general, and they were demonstrating at the capitol, so they had nationwide attention. There was this tremendous political pressure that was being generated from the strike.“
Strikes teach by example, and the teacher strike wave has caused educators across the nation to become more confident and emboldened to take action when needed. Gordon says:
“One of the reasons why the strikes that preceded this one [OEA] are so significant is it showed the teachers can win when they’re emboldened to take direct action. All of the subsequent groups of teachers in the states that struck after West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and then here in California felt similarly inspired. It just emboldened and inspired teachers to realize that you could do this and that it was necessary. “
McCormick notes that women, who make up a large majority of the teaching workforce, stand to gain gender power by striking: “A broad benefit of people being willing to strike is more and more women being more willing and more in tune with the fact that they are human beings. One of the biggest things that I see as a larger implication is that women see it’s okay to be outspoken and fierce in their defense of public education”. Suzuki Daniels sees the strikes as having potential for community building: “I think there is a lot of room for teachers to build on the strike as school communities. We have a stronger sense of our identities and our power, and we can and should be rallying around those left out or unrecognized in our contract wins (specifically referring to counselors and special educators) to ensure some of their needs are met in our next contract.”
Another benefit of the strike is learning organizing skills with implications for movement building in the near and long term future. For Suzuki Daniels:
“A lot of organizing goes back to the work I saw my parents doing when I was growing up on a reservation in rural Montana – showing up to events, shaking people’s hands, asking about their families, making connections between people, and inviting them to whatever’s going on in your circle. I think there’s a healing element to organizing that is often overlooked, but that draws people into the work. We don’t care until we know people, and we don’t know people until we’ve had space to share stories, food, emotions.”
Additionally, according to Garelli, the strike “made public education the number one discussed issue, not just through election season, but it continues to be at the forefront of every political discussion. The average educator is now aware of the funding crisis and is also empowered to hold discussions with community members, since they are now armed with facts and stats.”
[1] Charters Cost Two Bay Area School Districts $76.6 Million Annually, Report Says
Ali Tadayon-Ali Tadayon – https://www.eastbaytimes.com/
[2] Oakland Charters More Likely To Enroll Higher-performing Students Than District Schools
Mikhail Zinshteyn-Mikhail Zinshteyn – https://edsource.org
